Thanks to my old friend Sami Haapavaara (himself Porvoo’s answer to William Eggleston) for directing me towards the work of Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov. I like his work a lot. His basic premise is simple enough: artist travels to various European cities – Berlin, Vienna, Leningrad – and revisits the precise locations of old war photographs and then reshoots the image from the same spot. The results, once merged, are as beautiful as they are haunting.

New blog post: Just back from a weekend in Yorkshire where we took Darling Anna and baby button to see Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, near Bradford. Famous for its David Hockney gallery, I had feared that, like rain on sandstone, the years since my last visit might have eroded the mill’s artistic vision. Not a bit of it. Salt’s Mill remains just as good as any gallery in the country.

Have been listening a lot to Reverie Sound Review, the Calgary-based offshoot of Broken Social Scene. They remind me of the Cardigans, around the release of Life, for all their bittersweet melodies and delightful wistfulness. The five-piece have left it nearly seven years since the release of their début EP and the recorded the entire album without once being in the studio together. You can’t tell.

Just returned from a fascinating exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG). Apart from a few nights out to Snobs (when it was a house club in the early 90s) and one visit when I was at University, for which I can no longer recall the reason, I’ve never really known what to make of Birmingham. I’ve recently moved to the West Midlands, however, and been dragged, like some unsuspecting meteorite, into its gravitational orbit. Birmingham Seen is a really excellent exhibition, a perfect primer to the city for an outsider like me. It’s full of urban landscape paintings, some very detailed old photographs, Balladian photos of the abandoned Longbridge car plant and (above) Barbara Walker’s lovely paintings. I saw the city as a native might, at least for an afternoon

There was a time in my life when I could blog more frequently and thoroughly than this. So I need to be brief. The Middle East, from Queensland Australia are the best new band I’ve heard all year. They’ve just released their debut EP. The Recordings of the Middle East. You can download it from their offical site. What do they sound like? Like shoegazers with better melodies. Like the Arcade Fire’s over-sensitive younger sibling. Like Surjan Stevens without the religion or naivite. Take my word for it or listen for yourself.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may or may not be the most important novel of the 20th, as claimed on the front page of the Times earlier this week, although it is a very important one. The novel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its first publication on June 08. Naturally all the papers have been full of it. Here’s a rundown of the best bits:

The Torygraph offers a handy A-Z of Orwell, which includes the delightful vignette about the Queen Mother sending a Royal Messenger to Secker & Warburg to buy a copy of Animal Farm. They’d sold out. So off he goes in his bowler hat to the Freedom Bookshop, the anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel.

Robert Harris in the Times offers this more general piece which suggests, erroneously in my opinion, that 1984 would have lost some of its “unassailable posthumous integrity” if Orwell hadn’t have suffered an early death. Really?

The LA Times takes the tourist route: you too can go on a Orwell holiday.

One thing I was thinking about is that if Orwell were alive today, he’d probably be rather annoyed that we seem to have treated 1984 as an instruction book rather than a warning to avoid the Big Brother state, no?

My mother had only two books in her possession (after a lifetime of books, books, books) when she died four years ago: One was a Dorothy Parker collection. The other was a first edition of 1984. Now mine.

Two of my favourite things: beautiful bookshops and Bjork. Shame I couldn’t catch them both together on Friday when the Icelandic chanteuse previewed her latest work at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York. Thankfully the New York Times has a review, while YouTube is showing the inevitable handheld video. Bjork was accompanying the Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn-based ensemble led by Dave Longstreth. Naturally I wish I was there.

JG Ballard, who died on Sunday, will be remembered mostly for his fiction As noted in today’s Guardian he left a legacy right across the spectum of the arts, but he also left behind some of the most apt aphorisms and witty one-liners of the last century. Here is a sample of the most memorable:

On the legacy of science fiction:

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

On fear of the future:

“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”

On the internet:

“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.”

On rockets:

“Rockets “belong to the age of the 19th century, along with the huge steam engines. It’s brute-force ballistic technology that has nothing to do with what people recognise as the characteristic technology of this century: microprocessors, microwave data links – everything that goes in the world at the speed of an electron.”

On space travel:

“The suspicion dawned that Outer Space might be – dare one say it – boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn’t very much to do there.”

On the American dream:

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.”

On the American people:

“Americans are highly moralistic, and any kind of moral ambiguity irritates them. As a result they completely fail to understand themselves, which is one of their strengths.”

On American politics:

“The president of the United States bears about as much relationship to the real business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken.”

On his night at the Oscars:

“A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg’s film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: `Oh, oh . . . !’ and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defense of young [Christian] Bale.”

On the 20th century:

“The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.”

Just want to pay my tributes to the great JG Ballard, who has died of prostate cancer. For me he was one of the most truly original thinkers around and one of our most gifted writers.

Some of the early coverage: The Times got hold of Iain Sinclair last night, which was the most appropriate thing to do, as well as pointing out that, if nothing else, he added at least one word to the English language.

AP have put out a story headlined “Empire of the Sun author dies” which is not on quite the same freeway as the Sun’s similarly reductive response to the death of Orson Wells (headline: Sherry Man Dies). Ballard was so much more than that. So much more of him to miss. His contribution to literature was just so immense, but I can’t yet fathom it.

Here here. It’s been coming for a while I suppose, but I’ve been dreading it.

There’s something about the way he wrote, though, that makes this unlike other public deaths. The surrender to time in Crystal World, or the endless sun segues of Myths of The Near Future, or the neo-primitivism of High Rise… it’s almost like the Ballard you got to know from his books will arrive at death and find it just another set of chaotic conditions to adjust to.

There’s an inspired post over at Berlin’s Click Opera about the “Berlinification” of cities around the world. The post cites the UK government’s emergency measures to distribute thousands of grants to people who find creative uses for vacant shops as evidence of this emerging trend. Such a move – if successful – they argue should create a creative flourishing or the arts and culture, as happened to Berlin after the fall of the wall:

“Since it’s a global recession, I also like to think Berlin has now become a sort of template for cities all over the world. Whereas we might once have looked like a museum of crusty subcultures past their sell-by date, this city now looks like the future of Tokyo, the future of London, and the future of New York. We’re your best-case scenario, guys, your optimal recessionary outcome. Everything else is dystopia, Escape-From-New-York stuff.”

I’m intrigued to learn that the life of Lucien Carr is to be made into a film. Carr was the man who introduced writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (to be played by British actor Ben Whishaw).

Kill Your Darlings revisits an infamous night in 1944 when Carr stabbed his friend David Kammerer to death. He was later convicted of the manslaughter. Kerouac spent a night in the clink for helping Carr dispose of the knife.

It’s difficult to gauge how good it will be; films about the Beat Movement have been so uniformly dire, which is strange because you’d have thought that the movement would be made on the silver screen. All that great music; those wide open roads; the scenes of bohemian hedonism have somehow never been successfully translated to the cinema.

Taking a cue from the Royal College of Art’s annual Secret Postcard exhibition, students at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design have come up with an equally inspired way of funding their degree show. Short of funds, but rich in ideas, the students have clubbed together and bought a number of second-hand pieces of bric-a-brac (above) from various charity shops and then sent them to a number of their favourite illustrators and designers to be re-designed.

The list of designers is impressive in itself, including the likes of Jonathan Barnbrook, Michael Beirut, Paula Scher, Airside, NMo Design, David Carson and Kozyndan and many more. What’s more, most of the designers seem to have acquiesced with the request and the resulting re-designed items will be auctioned at the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane in London on April 30.

Just love this print of Edward Wadsworth’s Drydocked for Scaling and Painting (Liverpool). It’s a picture of one of his “dazzle ships” from World War I, so called because they deployed a “dazzle camouflage” in an attempt to mess with the minds of the German navy. The technique could disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery; so making it more difficult for the enemy to detect a be-dazzled ship’s precise distance and speed. Amazingly, the design exploited Wadworth’s experience as a vorticist painter, a British brand of cubo-futurism, that used bold, abstracted lines that similarly tricked the eye.

* A painting of his dazzle ships hangs in National Gallery in Ottawa and it celebrates the dazzling ships with equal boldness.

** Incidentally, the dazzle ships also served as an inspiration for the Factory Record’s Peter Saville, who used the technique to design a sleeve for an OMD album of 1983.
(via ffffound).

Responding to Google’s decision to remove music videos from YouTube after an argument over fees with the Performance Rights Society (which represents the rights of artists), the pair wrote a joint call-to-arms over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog. They wrote:

“Whether we like it or not, the old business model is broken and the decline in sales … has not been helped by the determination of the big labels to protect themselves at the expense of both artists and fans. Record shops have disappeared from our high streets and the big labels may go the same way, passing into the hands of asset strippers whose only interest is the bottom line. Yet, there is still clearly an audience out there for good music, and plenty of young musicians hoping to find them.”

This is why we need to find our voice now – to ensure that the next generation of artists are able to earn a living in the new digital music industry that is busy being born.”